Domains by first four characters

Grouping by the first four characters, the grandest group is international domain names (xn--). This was followed by the phrase "free" which had rougly 205 thousand names in the group. Words like "home", "best", "real" and "your" was not unexpected to find here.

Based on the data from looking at the first four characters some additonal lookups were performed. The following is a list of prefixes investigated

Domains by first two characters

The distribution of names by the first two characters is the following

It was commented that it is surprising that "go" is not on the list, with occurences such as GoDaddy and GoPedro. 354,548 domain names starts with the prefix "go". This is relatively high considering the number of words starting with go as compared to the other groups.

International domain names (xn--)

International domain names are stored as punycode. There are presently 361,420 domain names stored with international domain name support.

Punycode, defined in RFC 3492, is the self-proclaimed "bootstring encoding" of Unicode strings into the limited character set supported by the Domain Name System. The encoding is used as part of IDNA, which is a system enabling the use of internationalized domain names in all languages that are supported by Unicode, where the burden of translation lies entirely with the user application (a web browser for example).

The encoding is applied separately to each component of a domain name which is not represented solely within the ASCII character set, and a reserved prefix 'xn--' is added to the translated Punycode string. For example, bücher becomes bcher-kva in Punycode, and therefore the domain name bücher.ch would be represented as xn--bcher-kva.ch in IDNA.

Domain suffixes

There are currently 8879 active COM domain names beginning with "ebay". Many of these are probably used in phishing schemes trying to lure usernames and passwords from ebay users. Some examples might be "EBAY--PAYMENT" and "EBAY-ACCOUNT-REACTIVATE". Others again are perfectly legal and talks about ebay or the other services mentioned.

PayPal, known for payment processing, has been very exposed to hijacked accounts lately due to phishing schemes where the users themselves give their username and passwords to script kiddies. These again go on and purchase domain names, hosting and other objects and intangible items, often increasing the workload for those having to fix up after it.

1624 domain names begins with paypal. While some are perfectly legal names (not used in phishing), like paypal-alternative.com, too many can not have any possible use except trying to lure users.

Services differ when it comes to popularity, and seeing COMPANYNAME-haters.com and COMPANY-fans.com isn't uncommon, the following is a list of domain names that suffixes different companies.